ULEZ to Ukraine: Can it be saved from the people running it?
Bank Holiday Monday, May 6, 2024.
It’s 53 days since ‘ULEZ to Ukraine’ went live, here in London.
I regret to report this but the scheme has so far failed. But there is still time for a solution (I turn to this below).
The first vehicle is claimed by the scheme operator British Ukrainian Aid (BUA) to have been handed to Ukrainian recipients a few days ago. That is good news except that by now, remembering that Transport for London receives on average over 50 applications for scrappage EVERY DAY, there should have been MANY DOZENS DELIVERED and HUNDREDS WAITING TO GO. Instead we have a total of FIVE claimed to have entered Ukraine.
The reason for speaking up is because I have to. People are dying in Ukraine at the hands of Russian aggressors, Ukraine is under enormous pressure and its allies are not doing enough to help. Within the ULEZ to Ukraine scheme, I know of Ukrainian medics to whom vehicles were promised from the scheme who never got them. That is simply unacceptable.
Instead, I have had a succession of whistleblowers from within BUA who have come to me directly to say that the three trustees have failed for reasons that are fairly evident but which can’t yet be shared.
The most recent whistleblower, contacted me two days ago on May 4: ‘As of 30 April only 5 vehicles have arrived in Ukraine from over 200 offers of donation.’ This senior person close to the scheme continues, ‘I must decide whether to go to the TFL and the press and whistleblow on BUA….if I do nothing just a very small proportion of vehicles (10/20% may eventually arrive in Ukraine)’.
That’s not me. That’s from within BUA. If it was just one disgruntled volunteer saying it, we might be able to give the charity the benefit of the doubt. But it’s not. I am in receipt of a succession of similar testimonies scattered across recent weeks, and all the while knowing that many other Ukrainian and British groups of volunteers already expert in the field of taking vehicles to Ukraine have been rudely dismissed by BUA for reasons that are utterly mysterious but will one day have to be explained.
BUA has not just let down Ukraine but they have let down Britain. This was envisaged as a large-scale, tax payer-funded subsidy for a public good and the idea from the start was that while TfL understandably wanted to keep things simple by contracting with just one group, their assumption as well as everyone else’s including the Ukrainian Embassy, was that many other groups would help with resource, volunteer drivers and raw logistics. That's the only way to get a lot of vehicles over to Ukraine in a compressed time frame. It's called team work and it's powered ultimately by goodwill and generosity.
Success would be at least 1,000 vehicles delivered, and, according to modelling by TfL, the high figure might be 3,000, out of at least 40-50,000 vehicles scrapped. The subsidy will run out later this year so time remains but time is tight.
Instead, BUA’s three trustees, and there are only three, have not only squandered the considerable goodwill offered to them but have actively gone out of their way to destroy it, refusing to work with other groups, and then according to the insiders, quietly rejecting most of the vehicles offered so as to control the scheme rather than maximise the benefit to Ukraine.
Transport for London have officially said that 44 vehicles have been ‘accepted’ into the scheme. The exact status of some of those vehicles remains unknown but I personally counted 23 of them on April 30 in the field where they are being stored (PICTURED). To offer a comparison, Pickups 4 Peace ran their NORMAL convoy last week and delivered 30 VEHICLES. In other words, a SINGLE competent group could clear that field and more in one go. Instead, the vehicles are sitting there in the mud going nowhere. Why is this? I have had numerous people asking me that question privately so now it must be asked in public. Why indeed. And why isn’t the field full with another hundred vehicles? That’s even more painful to confront. Those vehicles have by now been scrapped conventionally. They could have gone to Ukraine. Londoners offered them to Ukraine and BUA turned them down. Now they have been profitably dismantled by private scrapyards.
I spent part of the weekend with a Kyiv City delegation visiting Ukrainian scholars at the University of Oxford, who had heroically put on successive concerts and other grassroots charity events raising £6,000 for a single ambulance to send to Ukraine.
Thinking about this makes me frankly furious, to know that meanwhile this BUA charity has been deliberately and knowingly rejecting ‘free’ vehicles offered to the scheme by Londoners keen to help Ukraine, knowing FULL WELL that other groups were willing to transport them to Ukraine AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE.
The good news, if it can be so described, is that this utter fiasco can still be fixed, but only if TfL knuckle down to do some work on Tuesday May 7, post-Mayoral election, and IMMEDIATELY open the scheme up – not for the first time of asking – by signing up another group to break the absurd monopoly they gave BUA, open up the pipeline and get more vehicles OUT TO THE BRAVE DEFENDERS OF UKRAINE.
As such please email directly lauren.tait@london.gov.uk, she is the Principal International Relations Officer for the Mayor of London; or write if you prefer a traditional paper note to Deputy Mayor for Transport Seb Dance, City hall, Kamal Chunchie Way, London E16 1ZE. Ask them to act swiftly to turn this scheme around by signing up a second charity to stop the rot.